1. Technical Field
The invention relates to a child safety seat for vehicles.
2. Background Information
Such types of child safety seats are known from the prior art. They have a seat surface and a backrest connected to the seat surface for the child that is to be held in the child safety seat. Furthermore, they have devices for affixing the child safety seat to the vehicle seat. These devices may include, for example, retaining receptacles for the seatbelts in the vehicle if the corresponding child safety seat is to be affixed to the vehicle seat by means of said vehicle seatbelt or seatbelt system. There are also known child safety seats that may be connected to the vehicle seats or to the vehicle chassis, in the area of the vehicle seats, on their fastening systems' retainer eyelets, as is done with the so-called ISOFIX system, for example. There are also child safety seats that can be connected directly to a vehicle seat or affixed to it in that initially a base is connected to the vehicle seat via the vehicle's seatbelt or the ISOFIX system or a comparable system, and the child safety seat is then connected to the base, for example through a latching system formed in the base and the actual child safety seat.
Furthermore, such types of child safety seats have their own belt system for buckling up the child being held in the seat. Such types of belt devices have at least one shoulder belt, which is routed through an opening in the backrest and proceeds partially onto a backside of the backrest. The backrest can be subdivided into a reclining element and a belt guide piece that can be moved relatively with respect to this, wherein at least one longitudinal slot extending in the longitudinal direction of the backrest is disposed in the reclining element and one belt slot is disposed in the belt guide piece. Due to the extension of the belt guide piece in the longitudinal direction of the backrest, the height of the belt slot and thus the outlet height of the at least one shoulder belt, which is routed through the belt slot, out of the backrest on its front, is adjusted and thus the belt position is adapted to the body size of the child.
Because a corresponding adjustment and adaptation of the position of the belt guide piece must take place such that once a position is adjusted, it is reliably maintained, a locking device is provided with such types of child safety seats, which has a locking element, which is pretensioned in a locking setting due to reset force, and which further has an actuating element for loosening the locking element from its locking setting and enabling an extension of the belt guide piece. With common child safety seats, all of these elements are fully contained on a backside of the reclining element.
Corresponding common child safety seats are known, for example, from EP 2 066 526 B1 as well as from U.S. Pat. No. 6,030,047 and U.S. Pat. No. 6,491,348.
With the child safety seats disclosed in the listed prior art, which involve seats for small children, which are seats of the so-called 0/0+ group or group 1, the mechanism for height adjustment of the seat-specific belt device is operated from the backside of the child safety seat, or more specifically from the backside of the backrest, wherein a respective actuating element on the back must be accessed, which means that the back of the child safety seat must be released and made accessible.
EP 2 208 637 A1 discloses a further example of a child safety seat in which, however, not all of the elements of the locking device are disposed on the backside of the reclining element. Release levers are provided therein and routed to the front side of the reclining element and can be actuated from the front side of the child safety seat in order to adjust the height of the belt device, even on a child safety seat that is installed in the vehicle and whose backside is not accessible. Thus, in this case, height adjustment of the belt guide piece for adapting the belt device to the body size of the child, though different than with the aforementioned solutions, common and known from the prior art, is enabled even when the child safety seat is installed in the vehicle; however, the handles, as parts of the release levers, are not located on the backside of the reclining element, which is different than the commonly known prior art, but are instead located laterally all the way to the area in which the head of the child being held in the child safety seat rests; and, in an extreme case, this could cause inherent risk of injury during a side impact crash. In this regard, this most recently described solution according to EP 2 208 637 A1 must be considered disadvantageous and unfavorable.